The Watermark Read online

  October 4

  Dear Amy,

  I write again, hoping you understand these long-overdue words.

  These days, I find myself wandering toward the past even as I plan for the future. I knew it would be a big step, coming back to the city and going back to Covenant. I am so often reminded of it all. Reminded of you.

  I carry your picture with me still—I clipped it from the newspaper. A pretty blonde laughing at the camera. A smile so bright it’s painful to look at. But I do look. I force myself to look. I deserve these memories.

  I only wonder when they’ll subside.

  Sheridan Blake

  two

  My roommate reminded me of myself at his age. That was a bad thing.

  Hours after the two prison movies and my feeble attempt at a prayer, I awoke at two-thirty in the morning—or at night, depending on who you talked with—and found Erik passed out in the dry bathtub. Clothes and all. I wondered if he had mistaken the tub for his bed. I spent ten minutes waking him up so I could lead him into his bed. He reeked of beer and smoke. I knew the scents well.

  I slipped Erik’s cover over him and made sure he was okay. My biggest fear in putting him to bed—and so far I’d done it several times—was that I’d find him dead the next morning from being strangled in his own sheets or, even worse, suffocating on his vomit. It’s sick to say, but these things have happened to just as many college kids as rock stars and actors.

  But Erik didn’t seem to be in any distress. He slept like a baby. I found myself envying him.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep. Instead, I wondered how long Erik would continue his endless partying and when—or if—he would ever grow up and give it up. Would he be like me, learning the hard way? Would a God-sent two-by-four have to hit him several times over the head before he learned?

  Had I learned?

  And what was I doing to help him, anyway? What kind of influence was I? Sure, I didn’t drink or smoke or curse in front of Erik, but I had never explained the reasons why. Maybe uttered an occasional “you might want to slow down” or something like that. But I hadn’t said anything else. How could I?

  I was a lot of things, but I wasn’t a hypocrite.

  Still, maybe there was something I could say to this young guy who reminded me so much of me. I hadn’t really known him that long. He had answered my ad on the campus bulletin board back in May, when the Covenant school year was ending. I’d put a simple blurb about my desire to have a roommate:

  Senior guy at Covenant needs roommate for next semester.

  2-bedroom apart. 15 min. from campus.

  I had gotten several calls about the ad. But Erik’s had been by far the most memorable. I’ll always remember it.

  “Yeah, are you the guy looking for a roommate next year?”

  “Yes,” I told the deep, laid-back voice.

  “Yeah, well, I’m going to be a senior. Actually it’ll be my fifth year at Covenant. I’m a communications major.”

  “Mine is music.”

  “That mean you’re gonna practice a tuba at the apartment or something?”

  “No, just the piano—and I do almost all my practicing at the college.”

  “Do you go to bed early?”

  “Actually, no,” I told him.

  “Well, look, I’m wanting an apartment where I can come and go, you know. Not an animal house or anything, but I go out a lot. Covenant has lots of rules about these things, so it can be tricky living on campus.”

  “I know,” I said with a smile.

  “You don’t mind a guy going out every now and then?”

  “No.” I didn’t.

  Erik had eventually showed up and I instantly liked him. He wasn’t much of a talker, but he had a certain relaxed confidence as he checked the apartment out. He was dark haired, with a short spiked haircut, and he wore baggy cargo pants and what looked like a used gas-station-attendant shirt with the name Bob embroidered on the front. He didn’t work at a gas station, though. He actually worked at a fitting place in his spare time: a Tower record and book store.

  What really clicked between Erik and me was music—when he came into my room and found my compact disc collection. I’m one of those guys who eats and breathes music. Years ago, I thought I would be a concert pianist. More recently, I wanted to compose electronic music. Now my dreams of making it big in the field were long gone. But the love of music still remained with me, as Erik discovered during that first meeting.

  “You have more CDs than I do,” Erik had said as he picked up one of them and cursed—not a vicious, obscene curse, but the kind where I could tell he didn’t even know he was doing it. The same way some people say uh all the time.

  “Who is Tangerine Dream?” he asked me.

  “An all-synthesizer group that’s been around since the seventies.”

  “Like new wave or something like that?”

  “No, it’s instrumental music. They were experimental at first, but they ended up influencing a lot of today’s music in both rock and the movies.”

  “You have like fifty of their CDs.”

  “I like their stuff. Most of it anyway.”

  The other apartment candidates I had talked to seemed responsible and levelheaded and studious—all the things I wasn’t. Not that I was some kind of beer-guzzling, toga-wearing frat boy. Those days were long gone. But I could still never live with a college student who went to bed at ten and woke up at five and studied and knew exactly where he was going in life.

  People like that scared me.

  Now, months after choosing Erik and knowing it had been the right decision, I lay in bed wondering when and how I could ever talk to him about my life. I was a private person, an introvert, someone who rarely shared secrets and emotions. How could I even begin to talk to Erik about all the things that had happened to me?

  I sat in front of the television the following Sunday morning around ten-thirty watching an NFL pregame show and feeling a little guilty. I knew where I should have been. I knew who I should have been listening to. The couch should have been a pew, and the voice of Terry Bradshaw should have been a pastor’s. I knew it came down to a simple case of courage—and I just didn’t have any.

  So I just sat there, thinking of the girl I had seen Friday night and wondering what I would have told her about myself had I not blown the opportunity.

  Let’s see. Let’s begin with the basics.

  I was a twenty-eight-year-old senior, finishing up my last year of college after a seven-year hiatus—but still not quite clear on what I was going to do next. I was living with a twenty-two-year-old kid who still had a lot of growing up to do before he graduated—in other words, someone a lot like me.

  I also lived with my most loving and trusting best friend, a dog given me on my sixteenth birthday. His name was Barney. I had wanted to name him Cujo or Butch or something that completely didn’t fit him, but my parents had insisted he looked like a Barney—and he did. Not the kids’ purple monster, though. My Barney was half sheltie and half Pomeranian, with golden brown fur and a never-ending smile. He was also about ninety in dog years, and an insulin-dependent diabetic.

  That’s right. I was the proud owner of a diabetic dog who got shots every morning and every evening. His sight was almost gone, and I don’t think he had heard a thing in two years. Gone were the days when he’d bounce up and down like he was on a trampoline, finally stopping to be petted or given a treat. These days Barney would totter toward me with the excitement of a man rolling down the hallway of his nursing home in his wheelchair. But he still got around all right, most of the time—except when I first moved into an unfamiliar apartment and he spent the first month bumping into the occasional wall or piece of furniture.

  Like any senior citizen, Barney required some special consideration. He was definitely not low-maintenance. But he had been with me since I was a teenager and seen me through a lot, both good and bad. And I had learned there were few things more satisfying than knowing t
hat a beautiful and loving friend waited at home for you, one who could never be disappointed or hold a grudge and who always seemed to light up whenever you stepped through the front door. The time spent taking care of Barney paled in comparison to the time he spent taking care of me.

  Besides caring for Barney and going to school and living with Erik, I also gave piano lessons to kids in the suburbs. This was something I had done in my spare time while working a variety of odd jobs since I was out of college. I had recently quit my last part-time job, waiting tables at a fancy restaurant ten minutes away from my parents’ house, and continued with the fifteen to twenty hours a week of helping younger kids live out their dreams (or their parents’ dreams) of being the next Beethoven or Elton John.

  And that was my life—on the surface, at least. I tended to view the surface part as okay. But things got stickier when you began to peel off the layers.

  Erik entered the living room and almost tripped over the hairy lump lying oblivious on the carpet. Barney barely moved.

  “Long night?”

  Erik nodded and sat on the couch, staring at the television while trying to wake up.

  “Remember much?” I asked him.

  Erik thought for a second. “Last thing I remember was having Jell-O shots at a party I was at.”

  “You mistook the bathtub for your bed.”

  Erik looked at me and laughed. After a few minutes, he must have realized that I had helped him to bed.

  “Thanks, man,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  I wanted to say more, but the phone rang. As always, we let it go. The answering machine clicked in on the fourth ring. Erik’s music-filled message played. Then a rough, irritated voice spoke.

  “Yeah, I’m calling for Sheridan Blake again. This is Mike Larsen. You know what this is about. It’s time we finally meet. We need to talk.”

  Erik looked at me. “I think he called and left a message yesterday,” he said.

  “I was hoping he’d get the hint,” I replied.

  Erik nodded. He didn’t ask anything more. That was one of the things I liked about the guy. He kept to himself. He wasn’t asking me questions about the past, questions about who this man was and why I wasn’t calling him back.

  Maybe Erik knew I was still running.

  October 10

  Dear Amy,

  I would give anything—anything—to talk to you. To know what you’re thinking.

  Once again, I question why I’m writing. Surely it does no good. But for some reason, I feel I need to write you these letters. I feel better penning these words on this paper. Perhaps it’s because I’m back at Covenant. Being here has brought back a cloud of memories I thought had been rained away years ago.

  I feel like I’ve been running from that cloud for so long. No matter how far I go, the cloud still hovers above me. It’s so high,so untouchable, so unmovable.

  I wonder if I’ll ever be able to watch it disappear, Amy. What I wouldn’t give to watch it simply fade away.

  Sheridan Blake

  three

  I sat on cement steps in an indoor arena overlooking a giant pool. Next to me sat a little blonde-haired girl who sipped from a cup of soda.

  “How do they do that?” her soft, high voice asked me.

  “They train them to do that,” I told her in my best impersonation of an adult, unsure myself how the people at the Shedd Aquarium taught the dolphins to jump up and down and glide on their backs.

  “This is my favorite part,” she told me, pointing. “When the people swim with them. I wish I could do that.”

  I nodded and looked out through the glass structure of the aquarium toward the deep blue waters of Lake Michigan. Even though I had spent most of my life growing up close to Chicago, this was the first time I’d visited the aquarium. Nita and her mother, Gail Primrose, had invited me on this big-city outing with them. Nita had been my piano student for four years, and in that time I’d gradually developed a friendship with her family.

  The graceful creatures wooed the crowd and Nita. She would clap and smile and look at me to acknowledge her enthusiasm. I clapped and smiled a lot, too, acting as if this was the best performance I had ever witnessed in my lifetime. It was pretty amazing. And seeing the cute ten-year-old’s grin made a part of me feel whole again.

  Gail Primrose walked up the aisle and sat next to her daughter. “Here you go,” the petite woman said as she handed Nita a sweatshirt. “A memento of the aquarium.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Nita said, still focused on the performance below.

  “I would have gotten you something, Sheridan, but I wasn’t sure about your taste. Would you like a T-shirt or something?”

  “Oh, that’s okay—I’m kinda overstocked on T-shirts these days. But thanks. This is great.”

  “We’re so glad you got to come with Nita and me. Aren’t we, honey?”

  “Yeah,” Nita replied.

  Gail looked over at me above her daughter’s head. “You really have been a blessing to Nita these past few years, Sheridan.”

  “She’s very talented,” I said.

  “Dennis and I especially appreciate your continuing to teach her now that you’re downtown at school.”

  “It’s no problem. Really. I go home anyway to do my laundry.”

  “Still, I know you don’t have to do it.”

  I smiled. “Nita’s soon going to be too good for me to teach.”

  “Yeah, right,” Nita replied.

  “But until then,” I told her, “you’re stuck with me.”

  When the climax of the dolphin extravaganza ended and the mass of people began to leave to continue exploring the rest of the Chicago attraction, I asked Nita what she thought of the show.

  “I loved it. Can we stay for another one?”

  “We’re going to go to Michigan Avenue now, sweetie,” Gail said.

  “Please?”

  “We’ll come back here sometime. And we’ll invite Sheridan again.”

  “I’m up for it,” I said in all sincerity. “It’s a great way to spend an afternoon. I’ll just have to make sure I don’t have class.”

  “I think it’s wonderful that you’re finishing up at Covenant.”

  I nodded at Mrs. Primrose. She and her husband, Dennis, were longtime friends of my parents and lived only twenty minutes from them, in the suburb of West Chicago. Both of them knew why I had quit Covenant seven years ago.

  “It’s been interesting having to study again,” I said.

  “I have to study all the time,” Nita said.

  “That’s right. And you’d better practice, too, before next week.”

  She made a face at me, then treated me to a dazzling smile. “I’m really glad you came with us today, Mr. Blake.”

  I had all my students call me Mr. Blake, even though I didn’t feel like a mister. Nita had been with me for four years now, ever since she entered first grade. She had progressed so quickly that I realized my time with her was drawing to an end. She would soon be moving on to someone far better and wiser on the piano.

  I hated to think about telling Nita good-bye. Most of my students came and went, and I had to accept this. Since I didn’t have a degree and had never really played professionally, I didn’t have the credentials to hold them for long—especially the talented ones. But I wanted to continue to teach Nita as long as I could. Every session with her reminded me of my childhood, of those days when I would play the piano for hours, always working to be better, always dreaming of what tomorrow would bring. Nita was like that too. She not only had talent, but she also remembered everything she was taught and practiced diligently to put it to use.

  As Nita, Gail, and I followed others out of the large, humid arena, I saw a figure to my left who looked familiar. Startling eyes, shimmering and almond-shaped, a rich velvet brown in color—the sight of them almost knocked me over. I didn’t recognize them at first without the glasses.

  They instantly recognized me as a finger pointed my way. “Hey, m
ovie guy,” she said with a pleasantly surprised look on her face.

  Movie guy?

  “Hello, again,” I said.

  It was the Wednesday after the movie night. I had wondered if I would run into the woman on campus at any point, doubtful if I would say anything to her if I did. The thought of meeting her again at the Shedd Aquarium had never crossed my mind.

  The tall guy with the frosted hair was with her. “How’s it going?” he said, more as a passing statement than a genuine inquiry.

  I nodded to him, knowing there was nothing more to say to either of them.

  “So I run into you at the movies and the aquarium,” the longhaired woman said to me, smiling and being friendly. “What next—the zoo?”

  “Maybe.” I still couldn’t believe I had run into her here.

  “I like the zoo,” Nita said.

  “And who is this?” the woman asked, curiosity filling her face.

  “I’m Nita.”

  Gail was already walking down the stairs and didn’t hear our introductions.

  The woman from the movie looked at me and expected something more, but I didn’t offer anything up. I felt uncomfortable, especially with the soccer stud at her side.

  “Did you like the show, Nita?” the woman asked.

  Nita went into a three-minute-long detail of her feelings about the show.

  “Okay, Nita. We have to go now. Have a nice afternoon,” I finally said as I led Nita away.

  “You too,” the woman answered. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

  She smiled a friendly grin that made me do the same. I wanted to say half a million things but instead walked away from the couple.

  Actually, I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to see her again. There wasn’t any reason to see her again. I didn’t know her name, had seen her twice with the tall guy at her side, and knew she had seen me alone on a Friday night and apparently baby-sitting a kid on another afternoon.